A group exhibition featuring multiple genres of artwork by various acclaimed artists concluded here Friday at Satrang Art Gallery.
The exhibition titled “Private Mythologies”, which started on 7 October, showcased the works of Salima Hashmi, Naazish Ataullah, Ashar Malik, Aanwar Saeed, Mehr Afroz, Nahid Raza, Shireen Kamran, Quddus Mirza, Mansoora Hassan and Noorjehan Bilgrami.
The show was organized by well known art critic Aasim Akhtar and he credited this exhibition as a wonderful example of curatorial polyphony.
“Polyphony in music is the flowing together of multiple voices, independent melodies woven into counterpoint. I have tried to internalize the need to create a situation that is receptive to complex spaces combining the big and small, the old and new, noise and silence,” Aasim said.
“I have tried to internalize the urgency to generate a situation receptive to complex spaces combining the big and the small, the old and the new, acceleration and deceleration, noise and silence”, Aasim Akhtar, the Independent Curator of the gallery analyzed.
Art critic Salma Hashmi inaugurated the exhibition and praised Aasim efforts for the show. “I am amazed about artists, which Aasim has brought together as they are all very particular about where, how and when their work is displayed. The fact that he has brought the 10 of us together tells us about his excellent powers of persuasion.”
Salima Hashmi’s paintings were from two of her series. One of the series was created after witnessing the destruction of the October 2005 earthquake. It is a reaction to the wreckage, the relief efforts and the vulnerability and resilience of people. The other series was painted after the destruction of Bamyan Buddhas.
Asma Rashid Khan, the director of Satrang Gallery, said, “Many of these celebrated artists have been pioneers of the contemporary art movement in the country.”
In the past years Satrang Gallery has been home to more than 300
artists, from young, new graduates to senior, established artists, the Gallery has hosted more than 40 exhibitions in its space, as well as organized competitions, charity exhibitions and book launches in the adjacent Satrang corridor, director of Satrang Gallery, Asma Khan informed.
Mansoora Hassan said, the work exhibited in this show was a part of her private collection and went back to the eighties. She is best known for the impulsive surfaces created in her early `stroke’ paintings.
Mehr Afroz’s work was comprised of the daily litany of responsiveness, keenly mapping nature and its cadences as a metaphor for the cyclical nature of human relationships. She narrated live experience without the directed specificity of autobiography or storytelling.
